The meaning nebula

(photo of Orion Nebula, taken by the Hubble telescope, courtesy of NASA)

At the moment I have a show up at BCB Art in Hudson, NY, one of the reasons for my bloggy torpor. I had quite a few compelling conversations with people about the paintings before, during and after the opening. Apart from anything specific about the work, the idea of meaning kept coming to mind. There were points of consensus and of disagreement regarding the paintings, but the main thing was that as I listened I could hear meaning being created by these viewers and interlocutors as they discussed things with me and each other. (I have talked about this before, but it was interesting to watch it happen again the other day.) The specificity, characteristics and impact of the paintings are inert until they hit a public. The artist may be the first viewer, but things don’t get interesting until someone else shows up to talk to. The viewers turn on the light switch and make the work visible. It shows meaning not as an entity but as a relationship, a dynamic, a network, or, perhaps, in the words of A. R. Ammons:

the “field” of action
with moving, incalculable center
...
the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
no form of
formlessness

Optimism

Turdus Migratorius, by Rick Leche

A brief follow up to a point in the last post about the logarithmic expansion of the territory called art. We attended a symposium entitled YES! The Persistence of Optimism at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College last weekend. Our very dear friend Hope Ginsburg was among the presenters and the chief allure for us, and spoke about her Sponge project, but all of the presentations were informative and several were quite compelling. (Follow this link for more information about the whole weekend of events.)

During the Q & A, I asked the panel how important their identity as artists and their association with the art world was to them, and if they thought they would be doing much the same thing if art did not exist or if they were not working under its aegis. I asked in part because many of the projects they undertook could have been classified easily under other disciplines or rubrics, for example sociology, mathematics, landscape architecture, and good old-fashioned activism, to name a few. On the other hand, I was wondering how much of this the artists would have come to, in the way they had, had they not approached it through art.

The answers varied. Oliver Herring, who does community-based improvisational pieces called Tasks, said, and I paraphrase, that he would be doing more or less the same thing, art or no art, saying he “looks for deficiencies” in society, and works to remedy them. From there the answers ranged back across the rest of the spectrum, all the way to "very important and couldn’t do it without art" on the opposite edge.

For a long time, art has been acting as a conduit to non-art activities as well as a consolidator. An artist may, for the purpose of an artistic goal, explore new, unknown to them, disciplines or activities to achieve it; an artist with diverse personal interests or passions may bring them into the art tent, as it were, and fashion them into a coherent piece. Without art, there is no space where a lot of these things could be mutually explored and synthesized in the same way. As a result, art has become the most vibrant laboratory for cross-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary studies, far out-stripping any academic or other alternative, hence its exploding appeal and protean (and sometimes exasperating) qualities.

One of the presentations we enjoyed most was by the self-declared “not artist” on the panel, Tod Lippy, the editor of Esopus, a fascinating, twice-yearly publication that includes an eclectic and thoroughly engaging variety of projects, portfolios and music. By all means have a look and subscribe. The issues are ridiculously cheap for such a thought-provoking and beautifully presented product.

Postulates

(A 14th century manuscript of Euclid’s Elements, showing Proposition 29, the first to rely on the parallel postulate.)

1) What is the value in making a positive or negative case for expression, content or communication in art the first place? It is not in the least obligatory or even advisable for a painter or any other kind of artist to engage in these sorts of investigations as a basis or prerequisite for work. There are legions, perhaps a preponderance, of artists who work away happily without the slightest concern for any of this, and I wish to whatever deities that may populate the firmament that I were one of them. But along with my passion for painting has long resided a deep-seated skepticism about what painting is doing and how it operates that has both bedeviled and animated my work since I began. The resulting interest as an artist has been to ascertain what possibilities exist for painting, and how to sensibly proceed. Some of the writing here deals with that, and I am grateful for any assistance offered along the way.

2) That being said, an exhaustive analysis of the dynamics and manner in which we apprehend artworks would be a insuperable endeavor in search of a contemporary Sisyphus. Over the last 50 years or so, a primary focus of many artists has been to expand art’s dominion into countless fields of form and inquiry, which has been accomplished at an ever accelerated pace. As a result, the full range and manner of artworks and activities defies any but the vaguest characterization. The scope of art has become so broad, and the territory covered by the word “art” so vast, that the utility of the term has been curtailed as the set of things that are not art or could not be considered art approaches null. There really isn’t any object or activity involving human beings that can’t be considered art, and the simple proclamation that something is art preempts any contrary claim. Which is all well, of course, as no one is keen on sacrificing a liberty once won, and eventually the word “art” may be left behind completely and other ways to talk about these phenomena will arise, if it’s not happening already. I am most interested in looking at some examples from various genres as a point of departure, with painting, and a focus on abstract painting, the eventual destination.

3) The act of looking at art and paintings is of course an experiential and dynamic process. Anything canned or self contained—takeaways, in the current parlance—is anathema to art’s dexterity, which equips it to treat ambiguity and polyphony without compromise or reduction; examine unexplored interstices and marginalia to discover new connections and associations; give voice to nuance and embody the ephemeral; and, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, create new space for the viewer. Anne Carson makes an illuminating observation in her book, The Economy of the Unlost, beautifully demonstrating how poets can overcome limitations of language to bring into focus something beyond what language can manifest literally:

At the same time, Spirit does not arise of its own accord, but is wrested from behind the veil by an effort of language between I and Thou. The effort, as Simonides and Celan stage it, is very like a poetic act reaching right to the edge of ordinary babble, to the place where metaphor waits and naming occurs...it contains visibles and invisibles side by side, strangeness by strangeness. (p. 68)

Spirit itself cannot be represented, named, but can be interpolated by poetically framing its absence. In one of her examples, “If to you the terrible were terrible,” from a Simonides fragment, “babble” is laid into the symmetrical structure of the line to illustrate the gap in the perception, between the speaker and her sleeping infant, of a violent tempest, while also pointing to the invisibility of the tremendous event to the sleeper. (p. 58) What Simonides is showing to us here, according to Carson, is that “'if to you the invisible were visible, you would see God,’ but we do not see God.” The gap between the capacity of language and our aspiration for it—demarcated but not bridged—shows language failing in a primary sense, but succeeding by making invisibles visible, framing what cannot be directly seen. “We know [words] don’t count, but we lay them against the abyss anyway, because they are what mark it for us, contrafactually.” (p. 65)

As a conception of art or as an artwork lists toward the declarative statement, so its compass contracts in direct proportion. Art is exceptional among human pursuits in its capacity to work fruitfully with what cannot be declared.

Expression

Igor Stravinsky said once that there is no such thing as expression. Samuel Beckett expressed his creative credo in 1949 as “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” Nothing new, then, about the idea that expression in the arts is suspect. At the same time, the presumption that the artist is communicating something is built into our language and thought, and hard to elude. We talk about “content,” “meaning,” “medium” and “message” of an artwork. Medium for what? What is being transmitted via the medium? Content? Ideas? Emotions? Where does it come from? The artist, obviously, no? Eliminate from consideration the hyper-rationalist notion that there is anything unadulterated—in terms of content, idea, what have you—that moves from artist to viewer via the artwork, the message in a bottle. Surely, though, illumination is at hand. If the artist is not telling us something, what is the point? Why do it and why look? How come I feel or think so when I see this particular painting, for example, and why do others feel or think similarly? Doesn’t this ratify that art is communication of some kind? But then what of the many differences in interpretation of works? A veritable Babel. One would not aver that competing interpretations are simply wrong, yet how can one call it communication when the response to the artist’s impetus is so varied? If one cannot track back through the work to some operating assumptions of the artist, how can there be expression? Maybe there is a more nuanced way of looking at it, less black and white. What if we talk about “feel” or “sensation,” rather than “content” or “communication,” can one capture the sense of the dynamic between artist, artwork and viewer, without getting tangled up in a philosophical Sargasso of artist intent and information transfer? On the other hand, either there is communication or there isn’t, right? And even if you describe it in more vaporous terms, there is still an implied connection to the intent of the artist, and thus communication? The artist did what they did so you would feel, more or less, the way you do. What if someone doesn’t “get it,” does that mean there are right and wrong responses to the work? Is the artwork itself the vehicle for the expression? If so, what happens when you pluck it out of its particular geographic or cultural sphere; doesn’t the interpretation vary wildly, and so how could the artwork be communicating anything? Mustn’t it then have much more to do with information in the artwork referencing things about which there is a preexisting cultural agreement within the sphere in question? Is that a problem, can’t it still be communication even if the artwork is reduced to a kind of semiotic matrix or forum? Do any of these questions actually produce contradictions? Does it matter? Should one just throw up one’s hand and get on with making art?

These are vexing questions to anyone who has examined them with the intention of clarifying their understanding of what occurs when art is made, viewed and processed, understood, discussed—complicated at times by the visceral aversion to erase one’s ego as an artist or, as a viewer, to confront the confounding miasma spawned by the realization that one’s response to an artwork is potentially ungrounded in the artwork itself, or in any intent of the artist, beyond the question of right or wrong interpretation.

Zero Hour Interview

Here is a link to an interview I did with Tim Bowring on his radio program, Zero Hour, on WRIR in Richmond, in conjunction with my show at 1708 Gallery. Tim has done over 300 such interviews, documenting the arts and culture in Richmond.

The interview covers some issues that I address on the blog. You can listen to it here (mp3).

Air on the shoe string

Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes, 1886

I am working on a couple of posts that expand on points mentioned in the last one, but they are not ready and I am trying to get back on schedule (both here and in the studio). So the posts will wait, but in recompense I offer three excerpts, held together by a shoestring...

“…work diligently from nature without saying to yourself beforehand ‘I want to do this or that.’ If you work as if you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupations, you will not always do well, but the days you least anticipate it you find a subject which holds its own with the work of those who have gone before us. You learn to know a country which is fundamentally quite different from its appearance at first sight.

“Contrariwise you say to yourself ‘I want to finish my pictures more, I want to do them with care,’ lots of ideas like that, confronted by the difficulties of weather and changing effects, are reduced to being impracticable, and I end by resigning myself and saying that it is the experience and meager work of every day which alone ripens in the long run and allows one to do things that are more complete and more true. Thus slow long work is the only way, and all ambition and resolve to make a good thing of it false.”

—Vincent Van Gogh, Letter from St. Rémy, mid-November 1889


“In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining.

“The nature of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work. But until now art presumably has had to do with the beautiful and beauty, and not with the truth. The arts that produce such works are called the beautiful or fine arts, in contrast with the applied or industrial arts that manufacture equipment. In fine art the art itself is not beautiful, but is called so because it produces the beautiful. Truth, in contrast, belongs to logic. Beauty, however, is reserved for aesthetics...

“But then, is it our opinion that this painting by Van Gogh depicts a pair of actually existing peasant shoes, and is a work of art because it does so successfully? Is it our opinion that the painting draws a likeness from something actual and transposes it into a product of artistic–production? By no means.”

—Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”


“—…That’s one of the causes: the lace. A thing whose name is, in French, also the name of a trap [le lacet: “snare”]. It does not only stand for what passes through the eyelets of shoes or corsets. Our voices, in this very place.

—I do indeed notice, now, that strange loop

—ready to strangle

—of the undone lace. The loop is open, more so still than the untied shoes, but after a sort of sketched-out knot

—it forms a circle at its end, an open circle, as though provisionally, ready to close, like pincers or a key ring. A leash. In the bottom right-hand corner where it faces, symmetrically, the signature “Vincent,’ in red and underlined. As though, on the other side, in the other corner, on the other edge, but symmetrically, (almost) on a level with it, it stood in place of the signature, as though it took the (empty, open) place of it…”

—Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting

The meaning of meaning

Andrei Rublev, The Holy Trinity, c. 1410

Several years ago I came across an article that lamented the loss of meaning in painting. (I can’t track it down.) It occurred to me at the time that the problem was not that meaning had been removed from painting, but that it never had any.

The primary sense of the word meaning is that of definition—not fully appropriate to this case, but worth bearing in mind as the gloss of this use casts a monolithic shadow of literalism across our terrain. In art, meaning is generally used as a synonym for content. In this application, meaning is message; it is what the painting holds and delivers, what is “contained” by the painting and what is consumed. The painting becomes a bearer of information, information that is received and understood by the viewer. There is an appeal for something artist and viewer could point to as probative (regarding the value of the painting) and determinate. The presumptions here are prima facie untenable. “Art is not a telegram,” Lyotard once said. Meaning and content in this case imply something discrete, a quantum, something that can be deduced and set aside as fact. This closes the door on the complex of interactions that constitute the conversation of art in our moment, and even of prior moments, and reduces the potential of painting rather than securing its value.

There is a legitimate practical concern of ensuring that one’s activity as an artist is not…meaningless, nugatory, but assuming fixed coordinates for meaning is not effective, and also has a nostalgic timbre that ignores the entropic nature of art in our moment and the entropic impossibility of reversing course.

As an alternative, a conventional maxim one sometimes hears is “meaning is what happens,” which is fine as far as it goes but it doesn’t go very far. Posit further then that meaning does not reside in the body of the work but instead begins with the experience of the viewers; that the artist is the first viewer, and from there meaning accrues in incremental and polyphonic fashion in the public sphere; that there is nothing irreducible “contained” in the painting as object; that agreement on subject matter in the work comes from agreements reached outside the scope of the painting, though these may be employed by the artist (e.g. iconography).

When the “content” of a painting is evaporated, or found to be non-existent; if the painting is not a means of expression; if there is not consensus on the significance or purpose of a painting or artwork, what is left to the artist? What form can meaning take? Are alternatives necessary? Is this a kind of nihilism, or cause for optimism? If one accepts these propositions, what products or activities are sensible for painting, for art?


Coda

I’ve been dilatory with posting, mainly due to travel for much of the last three weeks. I returned this weekend, and had a radiant, amusing and perhaps not unrelated dream on Sunday night. Some friends and I were in a cathedral, and the interior was filled by the colored light of tall stained glass windows. A friend asked me something and I replied, “Stained glass was the conceptual art of the 12th century.” It had something to do with the divine figures portrayed in the glass being manifested as bodies of tinted light inside the cathedral.